Madeleine died on May 4th, 1816, and, for years out of sight of a public which had long had other and less gracious objects for thought, her death passed almost unnoticed by the populace for whose amusement she had worked so loyally in her prime. Four years later, on March 26th, 1820, Despréaux followed her who had been his adored comrade for the greater portion of their lives. He had seen her, as little more than a child, win her earliest triumphs at the Opera, had seen her growing splendour as a woman of fashion, watched her through many years, danced with her, written for her and about her, seen her worst and best, and loved her well enough all through to wait till she would consent to marry him and with him retire from the stage they had so long adorned; and through the years, troublous for no fault of theirs, which followed their marriage, he cheered and consoled her for all she had relinquished, for the public worship all foregone, and for the neglect of the rising generation.
He it was who, though their means can hardly have permitted it, instituted the little déjeuners and supper-parties of kindred spirits, where songs were written and ballads sung in praise of love and wine and “la Gloire”—the one cry of the French Romanticists; all, one may well think, to cheer his beloved whose charm and goodness, poet himself, he never ceased to sing.
All this could not have been had not Guimard, with all her faults had more reserves of goodness than her earlier circumstances can have given opportunity for developing. Guimard had been grand; Guimard had been gay; but through it all Guimard must have been good in heart, full of sympathy and courage and generous charities of mind and soul; and Despréaux, gentle, wise, humorous, idealistic, honest, must have found her so, to speak and write of her as he always did, with ardour and a kind of boyish awe, even after she had passed away. No note of discord marred their married years, and when Guimard came to make her exit from the stage of life, silently, with nothing but ghostly memories of applause, her comrade, well we may be sure, waited only with impatience for his cue to follow her.
GUIMARD SPEAKS
(Ætat. 70)
“Yes, ye may laugh at Mère Guimard,
Laugh well, my girls, while laugh ye may!
But none of ye will fare as far
As I, who long have had my day.